Game of Thrones director: online piracy doesn't matter, wait, it does

The television adaptation of Game of Thrones isn't just
a success for its parent channel, HBO; it also holds the dubious
honour of being the most pirated television show of last year on TorrentFreak and
other public bittorrent trackers, something that one of the show's
directors, David Petrarca, didn't seem to mind... at least until
his comments on piracy at a recent panel discussion attracted
widespread internet attention.

Talking during an appearance at the Perth Writers Festival last weekend, Petrarca reportedly told his audience that he believed that illegal downloading
didn't matter because of the "cultural buzz" and commentary
generated by those watching. He went on to say that HBO's sizable
subscriber base -- 26 million in the US alone, and 60 million
worldwide -- meant that the channel was able to afford to create
high-quality programming despite those downloading and watching the
show illegally.

According to TorrentFreak, a single episode of the show saw
around 4,280,000 downloads last year -- roughly the same number of
people who watch the show on HBO in the US -- with more than 80
percent of the downloads occurring outside of the US. Australia is
said to be responsible for 10 percent of each episode's downloads,
a statistic that led to Petrarca's comment in Perth.

Almost as soon as Petrarca had spoken, his words were widely
disseminated and discussed across the internet, leading to a
retraction from the director. "I am 100 percent, completely and
utterly against people illegally downloading anything," he told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier today. "Nobody
wins by illegally downloading content."

What he originally meant, Petrarca explained, was that the high
level of illegal downloads merely proved that the strength of the
show's fanbase and buzz, not that the downloads contributed to said
buzz. "A buzz is created by the fact that so many people want it,"
Petrarca explained, adding that he hopes that there will one day be
a legal way for international fans to watch the show online. "It is
my hope that technology will find a way to take care of the piracy
issue," he said. "I think most people would be willing to pay for a
show they love."

When contacted for comment on this story, HBO released a
statement to Wired that "Game of Thrones is sold
worldwide, available legally on a large variety of viewing
platforms and is one of HBO's most popular series. With that kind
of success comes a great amount of social media chatter, so can't
say we see an upside to illegal downloads."

Despite HBO's comment about the show being available legally "on
a large variety of viewing platforms," there remains an ongoing
discussion about online access for HBO's content. Outside of HBO's
proprietary HBOGo service -- a streaming service which requires a
paid subscription to the HBO cable channel -- and individual
episodes or seasons for sale on iTunes and Amazon, the show is not
legally available online in the US; HBO rejected offers from the
likes of Netflix for streaming rights to its shows in an attempt to
maintain as much control over its content as possible.

Last year a fan-led campaign called Take My Money,
HBO! tried to convince the cable channel that there was a
willing -- and paying -- audience for a standalone HBO streaming
service. "We pirate Game of Thrones, we use our friend's
HBOGo login to watch True Blood," the campaign admitted.
"Please HBO, offer a standalone HBOGo streaming service and Take My
Money!" In response, HBO tweeted that it "love[d] the love for
HBO," but directed everyone to a TechCrunch
article that suggested that such a decision wouldn't make
financial sense for the channel. With such a high level of piracy,
however, the channel may soon have to reconsider the question of
whether or not streaming distribution via third party aggregators
will end up being the lesser of two evils.

Comments

Easily accessible and reasonably priced content is the only way to fight piracy. The internet is nearly 3 decades old and the industry still has a problem with grasping why people pirate stuff. The problem is they want to dictate the terms instead of providing the service people want.

mike

Feb 28th 2013

Simple way to sort out this "legally available online" thing. Host it on netflix an hour or two after initial release. Job done. Stop complaining that "Technology has yet to find the correct answer" when the solutions are readily available.

Dorian

Feb 28th 2013

"Nobody wins by illegally downloading content"

i can think of at least one group of people that do

david

Feb 28th 2013

So it doubles your viewing audience and arguably drives disk sales but it is in no way responsible for the hype and popularity of the show? It lets people find out they like something without spending a lot of money on disks sight unseen or paying for HBO's antiquated business model to enjoy the hour or two of quality programing they managed to produce each week. Although I have not been following the series a little over a dozen of my friends and coworkers found it through piracy and each ended up buying it on bluray. All people who would never get HBO and HBO would never have squeezes money out of otherwise.

Bill Hicks

Mar 4th 2013

I think a lot of piracy is down to restricted access to channels and technology. Just make it available online immediately or stream live at the same time and people wouldn't pirate it as much. I recently got a sky box, so I record everything and watch later but this is £20 extra month in HD quality so it would restrict people on a lower budget. If I missed something in the past and it was on the bbc then I knew iplayer gave me instant access in good quality so i didnt need to download a pirate copy.